Glenn Beck Suspected to Be Struggling With Depression
Off-Camera Behavior Alarms Colleagues and Worries Network Executives
Popular television and radio personality Glenn Beck has been serving up a unique blend of political and social commentary for years, earning millions of fans along the way. Nearly every day the self-described conservative libertarian preaches about American values, patriotism, and politics in terms that delight his audiences and infuriate his critics. But while Mr. Beck usually exhibits an affable and at times sentimental presence on the air, colleagues and friends say Beck’s behavior behind the scenes suggests he is a man far removed from his public persona.
In fact, many sources suspect the Tea Party darling and founder of the 9.12 Project is waging an intense battle with depression and madness.
“I like Glenn,” said one star at Fox News. “I like him a whole lot. But it’s hard not to worry about him. Yesterday we bumped into each other outside my office. He seemed lost, and I got the sense he’d been standing in the hallway for a while. When I said hello he just looked at me with these gray, vacant eyes and said, ‘When you think about it, none of us are free. I mean really free, like fireflies, like buffalo. Try to grab onto freedom, but you’re grasping for an illusion.’”
“I asked him if he was feeling well,” continued the star. “But he just walked away. I called after him, but he never looked back.”
Similar tales of sad and worrisome off-camera conduct were recounted by others at Fox, all of whom suspected Mr. Beck is contending with a serious problem.
One network employee, a relative newcomer to Beck’s own staff, described a recent encounter she and a coworker had with Beck. During a production break, the two women were engaged in a humorous discussion about children and families, characterized by the staffer as “innocuous.”
According to the staffer, Mr. Beck was nearby pouring himself a cup of coffee. He soon interrupted the conversation and said, “Ladies, I don’t want to frighten you, but I realized a long time ago that none of us will achieve intimacy with anyone. It will never happen. We’re locked up in tiger cages of our own making. We can see each other, sure. But we can’t touch. We can’t ever touch.”
The staffer explained that she and her colleague initially thought Mr. Beck was joking. “But after a few minutes we both realized he was serious, and we felt bad for him,” she said. “A remark like that comes from someone carrying enormous pain.”
In addition to encounters such as these, Mr. Beck has been observed displaying behavior some say is evidence of mental illness. Colleagues shared stories about Beck arriving late and unprepared to the set of his television show, locking himself in his office and blaring heavy metal music with incomprehensible lyrics for hours at a time, roaming stairwells and hallways in a daze, and oscillating continually between moods of sorrow and frustration. One man claimed he discovered Beck shouting at himself in a bathroom mirror “with such concentration that he never knew I was there.”
Several of these sources speculated that Beck’s troubled behavior may be his way of seeking help, and others wondered if he may be headed for a complete breakdown.
“The man is locked up inside with his demons. Everyone around him knows it. Everyone can see it,” said one long-time friend. “But I don’t think he knows how to ask for help. It’s like he’s headed straight for the cliff.”
The friend complained that over the last few months Mr. Beck had routinely rebuffed what were once commonplace social invitations, such as dining out at his favorite restaurant, Dave and Buster’s.
“Things started getting weird before he stopped going out,” said the friend. “The last time we went out to D&B’s, he had a rough time. He was playing Whac-A-Mole, his favorite game in the whole world, when out of the blue he just gives up and drops his mallet. He just stood there watching the moles move up and down. Then he looked right at me and said, ‘Are we the moles? What if we’re the moles?’ I thought he was messing with me, but when I started laughing, he started screaming.”
“He lost all control,” the friend continued. “I got him out of there as fast as I could. I tried to talk with him about it in the parking lot, but he shut me out. He just got in his car and drove off.”
This gentleman, like other friends and colleagues around Mr. Beck, tried to convince the star to seek professional help, or perhaps take an extended vacation. Each said Beck refused or totally ignored such suggestions.
“He laughed at me when I said he should see [a counselor],” noted one colleague at Premiere Radio Networks, the corporation that distributes Beck’s nationally-syndicated radio program. “He didn’t even look at me while I was talking. He just fingered that framed American flag he carries—you know, the one that says ‘FREE’ where the stars should be? A moment later he called me a ‘red commie whore’ and told me to get out of his sight.”
According to the colleague at Premiere, Beck apologized within hours of that encounter.
“That afternoon he brought me flowers and said something about how we’re all beautiful Americans under the same blue sky,” she said. “I was thankful for the gesture, but it seemed that much clearer to me that Glenn won’t get help on his own. He needs someone to force the issue.”
The question of how to intervene, and who should do it, has weighed heavily on the minds of many at Fox and Premiere. While it was not often expressed in conversations with this reporter, a few high-level sources were bothered about the possibility of Beck’s downtime struggles becoming on-air problems for their networks.
One high-level source at Fox admitted he has been keeping a close eye on Beck’s television program in the event its host shows signs of losing control. The executive emphasized that Fox’s response to an “on-air incident” would be measured and appropriate. Regardless, he disclosed that he’s not the only one at Fox who worries about how a Glenn Beck meltdown might damage the network’s standing as “the undisputed leader of the news industry.”
“Obviously, we need to be careful,” the executive confessed. “He’s got a number of us spooked. We worry he’ll lose control during a broadcast and embarrass the hell out of us, that he’ll go out there and admit to masturbating to pictures of clowns, or that he’ll smear feces on his blackboard and insist aliens from another galaxy are living among us and colluding with left-wing bloggers to take control of his mind. We worry he’ll go out there one day and say, ‘Hi America, I’m Glenn Beck, just another white man on Fox with an anus for a mouth!’”
A moment later, the executive paused and looked out his office window, wearing a troubled expression.
“It keeps me up at night, the things I’ve been hearing,” he said. “Glenn Beck has done a lot of great things for Fox, and he attracts a lot of what we call ‘easy-mark’ viewers, but at some point one wonders if we were playing with fire when we hired him. One wonders if we should have seen this coming a long time ago.”
posted by Spank Mickelson @ 7:05 PM
